No matter how hard we try to make sure that other ISPs never block mail from our servers, it happens occasionally. All it takes is someone at another ISP clicking “this is spam” on a few legitimate messages sent by one of our customers, and some automated system at the other ISP thinks “hey, one of these tigertech.net servers is sending spam; let’s block it for a while without bothering to notify them, ‘for your convenience'”.
Now, we should emphasize that this is actually quite rare.
Read the rest of this entry »
Anyone who works with computers has been asked to do this at some point in time and probably felt it was a ploy used to put off investigating the problem in detail. However, it really does work, and can fix program and software glitches.
For instance, we often have customers who cannot send and receive mail using the mail programs on their personal computers. After checking the mail servers and port numbers, everything seems to be set up correctly, but the mail program refuses to work. In these situations we often ask customers to restart their computer. Surprisingly they often tell us that everything works again.
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ll be talking a lot about “security updates” on the blog, so a word about what these are and how we handle them is probably in order.
There are literally thousands of software programs on our servers, most of which are written by other people and used by many companies. From time to time, “security vulnerabilities” with these kinds of programs are discovered. A security vulnerability is something that could allow a “hacker” (or “cracker”, for purists, although that battle has been lost) to take advantage of a programming bug to do something unauthorized with the program, such as send spam or delete files.
Read the rest of this entry »
We had an interesting support phone call today from a customer who was having trouble sending and receiving e-mail. She was using a wireless connection today. She had also been using a wireless connection yesterday, and it had been working fine then. Before calling us she had tried restarting her computer (as we recommend for most e-mail problems), but that didn’t seem to fix the problem.
Read the rest of this entry »
To quickly determine your computer’s current IP address, simply visit http://support.tigertech.net/ip.
The following stable PEAR packages were updated on our hosting servers today:
- File_SearchReplace: 1.1.1 to 1.1.2
- Net_UserAgent_Detect: 2.2.0 to 2.3.0
- PEAR: 1.5.1 to 1.5.3
The full list of PEAR modules we have available (and more details about PEAR) is on this page.
We’ve updated PHP 4 on our servers to cover six recently identified security issues. Users shouldn’t notice any changes.
An upgrade for PHP 5 is also in progress. After testing, we actually rolled out the update onto our servers for a short time, until a customer reported an unusual problem with vBulletin posts getting cut off when they contain an odd number of apostrophes shortly afterward. This problem appears to be related to the update, so we have rolled back to the previous version of PHP 5 while we investigate this. (This kind of thing is very rare: this is the first security update in over year that has caused a problem. We have a suite of “regression tests” that we use to test PHP upgrades, and there wasn’t a general problem with it. We’ll follow up with more details when we know more.)
By the way, if you’re unfamiliar with what we mean by a “security update”, this page will help.
Welcome to the Tiger Technologies blog!
Although we already have a mailing list for Important Announcements, we try to keep traffic there to a minimum. But there are lots of other things happening that we’d sometimes like to share — everything from minor software updates on our servers to useful tips from our support staff.
One of the most useful features is RSS feeds. RSS feeds let you use a feed reader to “subscribe” to all the posts on the blog, or just to particular categories. For example, if you want to see the key things we think every well-informed customer might want to know, you could subscribe to the “Blog Highlights” feed. Or, if you want to know about every last technical change we make to our server platform, the “Tech Corner” feed is for you!
By the way, we should mention that we’ll probably be making lots of changes to the blog as it evolves. We may even change the names of some of the categories, which would cause your RSS feed to stop working. If that happens, you can simply visit the blog again and re-subscribe to the new feed name.
We hope this blog is useful, and we welcome comments and feedback.
